HUMAN PERSON ARE ORIENTED TOWARD

THEIR IMPENDING DEATH

A. Recognizing The Meaning of One’s Life

Who I am? What is the meaning of life?

This lesson shall evaluate the meaning of life and various

perspectives of human limitations such as death. It is vital that the learners

contribute in identifying their own goals and become aware of the meaning

of life.

 Socrates

 Plato

 Aristotle

Socrates

Socrates, a great teacher in Athens around 469 BC argued that knowing oneself is vital

in resolving life's problem (Berversluis 2000).

Socrates two different ways of teaching

a. Socratic Method -The Socratic Method is discussion and reflective type.

• Assesses the character of the student through questions, gives students sets of

problems

b. Expository Method - A lecture type.

 • Answers the student's direct or implied questions.

2 Process of Socratic Method:

Ironic process

- a process that serves the learner to examine one's belief by freeing the mind of

prejudgments and then by humbly accepting his or her lack of information and insight.

Maieutic Process

- the process of making a person realize the full meaning of his or her thoughts that is

employed after the first process has cleared the mind of the learner of ignorance, and

then draws truth out of the learner's mind.

Plato
- the process of making a person realize the full meaning of his or her thoughts

that is employed after the first process has cleared the mind of the learner of ignorance,

and then draws truth out of the learner's mind.

This contemplation does not mean passive thinking or speculation, or knowing and

appreciating what is good; rather, it is doing good in life. In other words, to think of one's

actions and do what is right and appropriate.

Plato's Theory of Immortality

According to Plato, the physical human body is the source of endless trouble to

us by reason of the mere requirement of food, being liable also to diseases overtaking

and impeding us in the search after true being; it fills us full of love, lusts, fears, fancies

of all kinds, and endless foolishness.

Aristotle

Realizing Your Potential

 Aristotle's account of change calls upon actuality and potentiality (Hare et al.

1991).

 For Aristotle, everything in nature seeks to realize itself to develop its

potentialities and finally realize its actualities. Actuality refers to the complete and

mature form of a creature or thing. All things have strived toward their "end."

 Aristotle called this process entelechy, a Greek word for "to become its essence."
 Meaning of Life (Where Will This Lead To?)

 Friedrich Nietzsche

 Arthur Schopenhauer

 Martin Heidegger

 Jean-Paul Sartre

 Karl Jasper

 Gabriel Marcel

Friedrich Nietzsche

Realizing one’s “higher self” means fulfilling one’s loftiest vision and noblest ideal.

On his way to the goal of self-fulfillment, Nietzsche encountered perilous difficulties. The

individual has to emancipate oneself from environmental influences that are false to

one's essential being, for an enslaved individual is “a disgrace in nature”.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The essay of Schopenhauer begins with the predicament of the self with its struggles

and its destiny: What am I? What shall I do with my life?

 Unique persons are responsible for their own existence

 Schopenhauer's will is ultimately without purpose, and therefore it cannot be

satisfied.

 Schopenhauer, thus, sees the willful nature of reality, a reality that has no point

and cannot be satisfied

The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, Schopenhauer contends that all of life is

suffering:

 Suffering is caused by desire, and we can alleviate suffering, as the Buddhists

taught, by "putting an end to desire."

 For Schopenhauer, our egoism produces the illusion that other people are

separate and opposed beings, in competition for the satisfactions we crave.

 We only imagine that they are detached from us, and therefore we imagine that

we can further the aims of our own will at their expense. The result is that our

desires lead us to harm each other.

 So long as we are limited to the phenomenological perspective, all of us will

continue to assert our will against others, adding to the overall suffering of human

experience.

Martin Heidegger

- In Heidegger's arguments, existence is demonstrated in care.

• Care is understood in terms of limited temporality, arguments, existence is death

is a possibility.

• Only by living through the nothingness of death in anticipation can one

accomplish authentic existence.

 • Death is nontransferable; each of us will face our own demise (being-unto-

death). Death is neither accidental nor analyzed.

• Anyone who experienced death of a loved one seems to be robbed of the

possibility of understanding and analyzing it.

• Jean-Paul Sartre disagreed with Heidegger. For Sartre, death is not a possibility

but the cancellation of possibility (Landsburg 2009).

Jean-Paul Sartre

- Sartre's thinking is considered to be a representative of (atheistic) existentialism

(Falikowski 2004).

• Sartre argued that the human person desires to be God', a being that has its

sufficient ground in itself (en sui causa).

• For atheist since God does not exist, the human person must face the

consequences of this.

• The human person is entirely responsible for his or her own existence

• There are no guideposts along the road of life. The human person shapes one's

destiny for he or she is a creator (Landsburg 2009).

• Sartre is famous for his dualism: en-soi (in-itself) signifies the permeable and

dense, silent and dead.

• Pour-soi (for-itself).
• Jean-Paul Sartre

 Sartre's existentialism stems from this principle: existence, precedes, essence.

 Absolute freedom and responsibility are therefore fundamental, such are the

access to authentic living.

 The human person who tries to escape obligations or chose to be trapped in a

situation

 In his essay, No Exit, Sartre alleges, "Hell is other people." Sartre reflects that

when someone looks at other people, they become objects.

 There are so many other contemporary issues regarding our society that

Heidegger will call as concrete examples of the care.

 Finally, Heidegger's philosophy is a call to each one of us as part of this

globalizing world (Ramos 2016, 98).

 We are a part of the millennial call for change. What happened in different

countries, whether typhoons Yolanda or Katrina in US, are not done overnight or

by one person.
Karl Jasper
- One of the German’s who resolutely opposed Nazism

 He was the first German to address the question of guilt: of Germans, of

humanity implicated by the cruelty of the Holocaust.Jasper's philosophy places

the person's temporal existence in the face of the transcendent God, an absolute

imperative. To live an authentic existence always requires a leap of faith.

 Transcendence relates to us through limit-situation (Grenzsituation). In the face

of sickness, unemployment, guilt or death, we are at the end of our line. At the

limit, one comes to grief and becomes aware of the phenomenon of one's

existence.

 Authentic existence (existenz) is freedom and God: Freedom alone opens the

door to humanity's being; what he or she decides to be rather than being what

circumstances choose to make him or her.

 The decision that one makes as how to face these situations are his or her own

and only his or her own.

Gabriel Marcel

For Marcel, philosophy has the tension (the essence of drama) and the harmony (the

essence of Marcel, philosophy has tent is a metaphysical "disease."

• Philosophy in disharmony, takes place through a reflective process

that Marcel calls secondary reflection.

• The question "What am I R ^ prime prim e cannot be fully answered

on human level. The question that proved unanswerable on the

human level turns into an appeal